


Fingers Crossed

by jamocha101



Category: Steam Powered Giraffe
Genre: Angst, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, wwi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 02:59:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14535216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamocha101/pseuds/jamocha101
Summary: Colonel Walter struggles to send his automatons off to another war.  One proves more difficult than the rest.





	Fingers Crossed

**Author's Note:**

> I don't think The Jon actually had his name at this point, but just try to suspend your disbelief surrounding an unfortunate canonical anachronism. There are plenty to be had.

Peter A. Walter sat in his office with dread. His hand hovered over a stack of papers, months’ worth of correspondences that sapped him of his strength. The circles beneath his eyes darkened. Sometimes one of his robots—one of his boys—would cast a smile at him. And despite the sweetest intentions, his heart only quavered more.

The door creaked open and Walter hardly acknowledged it, absently avoiding eye contact with the tall titanium automaton that stalked in.

Walter insisted on giving this talk to the robots—the soldiers, the fighting machines, as far as anyone else was concerned. He thought it would be better that they heard it from him than a militant stranger. He thought they would listen more carefully. He thought that his words would carry more gravitas—but while he had apprehensions, he never foresaw how difficult it would be to bring his voice forward.

He hadn’t noticed when the titanium robot, painted in concern, had spoken to him.  
“Sir?”

Walter snapped out of it. For the first time, he looked at his creation straight into his optics. He wanted to speak with The Spine first—he decided to go through each one of them individually without laying out a clear reason. They were gathered outside his office, awaiting to get called in by turn. The middle child—the futuristic silver automaton that towered at just under seven feet—had always been the cool head. Maybe the Colonel was looking to assure himself that he could really do this by setting himself up for success.

_Lay out the prerogatives_ , he had been told. Make it clear to them. Make sure they know their mission.

Peter reeled as he did as he was told—he gave the prerogatives. It was sort of like a send-off. The robots knew for weeks now that they were being shipped away, carted off under the valiant call of their nation, and, like sheep lined up for the slaughter, they dreaded their fate without being informed of what it was.

_Protect your fellow soldiers at all cost. Your country comes foremost. Your duty is to put everything and everyone before yourself—human lives always come first. They come before yourself. They come before each other._

As expected, The Spine was stoic as if he had been prepared for this talk all his life. He sat before his creator and took the news that he was being shipped off to war to fight as a machine yet again without batting a metaphorical eyelash—but the Colonel was unsurprised to detect the slightest, most negligible hint of hesitation in agreeing to the last prerogative. 

The Spine looked into Walter’s eyes. His optics were stolid, stony. They were uncomfortably human. When The Spine said the final ”Yes, sir,” he had his fingers crossed in his lap.

Rabbit was next. Peter expected him to be the problem. He was always emotional, even volatile at times, if not unwaveringly good-natured. But when Rabbit became upset, he was nigh inconsolable. The Colonel was surprised at the reaction he solicited. Rabbit was clearly unhappy, but he remained almost radio silent until his vocal confirmations were necessitated. Whereas The Spine’s posture had remained ram-rod straight and proper, Rabbit slouched in the chair as if he couldn’t be bothered to take the conversation seriously. Walter couldn’t tell if his eldest creation was angry at him, or if he felt anything at all. His mismatched optics stared into the irises of his creators as if he didn’t recognize them. It hurt like hell. 

But buried underneath the torment was the copper automaton’s eagerness to please.

_Human lives come before everything. They come before yourself. They come before each other._

Rabbit flinched at this—it was minute, but nobody knew the robot better than Peter A. Walter, and that was why he could tell how it bothered his creation. For a long moment there was silence, and Walter said, “Rabbit. I know. But—I need you to agree to these parameters.”

“You’re saying—” danger and sadness crept into those optics. “…that, say…if some shmuck has the gall to point a gun at my brother’s power core—” he pointed two fingers at his own chest as if for emphasis; “and there’s some foreign doughboy in the way from another country who I never saw or spoke to once in my entire life…and just because he’s human…”

Walter reflected the pain in his eyes. His hands were strangling each other in a vice grip atop his desk. He nodded slowly.

Rabbit eased up and sank back into the chair, resigned. For once, he knew that it was worthless to fight. He crossed his fingers, hidden in his pocket, just as his younger brother had. And he agreed.  


Jon shaped up to be the problem. Peter felt that he should have known better; he had been banking on the youngest robot’s docile nature to get through the conversation without incident. Ironically, it was this very facet of his personality that made it difficult. At first he just sat there, across from Peter’s desk, looking at him with that wide deer-in-headlights expression. His brass face plates were unreadable.

“You and your brothers are being sent away for a while. Your nation needs you. The world needs you.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Spine must have rehearsed this with The Jon prior. The poise was so foreign that it made the situation even more unsettling than if the little brass bot had thrown a fit from the get-go. Whether it was external coaching or his own intuition, The Jon had entered knowing that something was wrong. Peter continued, “Human lives come before everything.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Even yourself.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Even each other.”

There it was. The hesitation. The Jon just stared. It almost looked as if he honestly tried to vocalize the obligatory pledge—but the words were physically caught in his larynx. Just like that, ghastly memories from the Weekend War flashed in front of his optics and oil traveled to the brims of the blue orbs.

“Jon,” Peter started, exasperated. He tried to remain patient. “I need you to agree to this.”

It was just more silence. The Jon put an honest, good-natured effort to hold back his oil tears. For now, he was succeeding, but it wouldn’t be long. 

“I thought we were done,” the little bot said in a heartbreakingly quiet voice. “You said we’d be done. You said that—”

“I know—I know,” Peter said. His eyes traveled away. He couldn’t bear to look at his youngest creation. The innocent, the golden boy who saw the entire world through incomprehensible, brightly-colored glasses. He could never even hurt a fly on purpose. He was all but non-martial during the Weekend War. Peter cringed at the thought of sending him off to fight again. With Rabbit and The Spine—of course it was sad. It’s always sad to send family straight into peril without knowing the ultimate outcome. But with The Jon…it was different. He had not enough lucidity and too much of it at the same time to completely understand what was going on. Putting him in a position that necessitated grittiness, violence, an abandonment of affection, of feeling, of touch and attachment—it simply didn’t compute.

In the pause that ensued, The Jon had been working hard on keeping his tears at bay. Peter grabbed a tissue off his desk and circled around to the brass automaton. “Now, Jon, you’ll get oil on the upholstery.” First he tried to hand the rag to the robot, but it took him hardly a second before he knew that it was fruitless. He tried drying The Jon’s eyes himself, but when he reached for the brass bot’s face, the small automaton jerked away and stood up out of the chair. 

It was an unusual display of defiance, but it took a mere second for the Colonel to chalk it up to hysteria and he abandoned his efforts to save his textiles from The Jon’s tears and instead reeled forward, grasping the automaton’s narrow shoulders. 

He got close to The Jon’s face. He felt his breath come out hot. The ensnared brass mechanism shrunk in his grasp. “Listen to me. You know it’s not up to me. You know I wouldn’t send you or your siblings away if I could help it. But right now—your country needs you. The military expects you to be in the ranks. You’ll be saving lives.”

The Jon was struck dumb. Black tears finally spilled, cascading down his face plate. “I don’t want to go,” was all he could manage to say, but it was stifled by agonized snuffling. He tried to wiggle free of Peter’s grip, but the inventor only held onto him tighter.

“I’m sorry, son,” Peter said genuinely. “Trust me—you and Rabbit and The Spine—you’ll be back before you know it. It’ll go by quickly. You won’t even know what happened.”

The Jon shook his head and let out a sob. Peter removed one of his hands from the vice grip on The Jon’s shoulder and attempted to swipe away the tears, but the small automaton took advantage and jerked free, stumbling back. He looked painfully small as he shrunk in on himself, desperately trying to stifle his own tears to no avail. If only, Peter found himself thinking as he hopelessly watched the display. If only they could see this. Then they would think twice.

“You lied,” The Jon started to say. “You lied to us. You said we would never have to do that again…I don’t want to go back…back to all that…noise…”

The Jon was struggling to express himself and Peter was struggling to handle the situation diplomatically. Of his three metal men, he understood The Jon the least; he had been a special case from the second his power core accidentally opened a riff into another dimension. Perhaps that was a portentous occasion.

The Spine and Rabbit swooped in just as The Jon was waxing hysterical. They entered the office without Peter even noticing at first; they must have been listening through the door, better at anticipating the sour reception than their creator. Peter stepped back as the small brass robot was enveloped in his brothers’ embrace.

Peter Walter allowed the elder robots to take over with complete trust in them and returned to his desk in exhaustion and exasperation. It wasn’t The Jon who drained him of his energy per se; the gestalt of the difficult situation was throwing him for the loop. These beings weren’t simply machines, but it seemed that only he and the automatons themselves were capable of understanding that; and even he didn’t always completely understand.

Why can’t you just program them to fight? He had been asked countless times when he attempted to explain that the robots were more than just the summation of their mechanical parts; they had personalities, they had feelings, they had sentience, they had attachments. It was the nature of Blue Matter; it gave them personalities, over which he had no preempt, no foresight. He had, of course, creative design and aspirations to emulate as he built each one. But he could not predict Rabbit’s cleverness, or stubbornness, or emotional volatility. It wasn’t his hands that wired The Spine’s maturity, cool-headedness and sophistication with a touch of affection. And of course, The Jon’s lack of lucidity was not bestowed by any volition of a mechanic; his sweetness, his innocence, his tactility, his alternative methods of processing things…Peter A. Walter did not invent or insert them. And surely, it followed that he could not simply remove them.

Sometimes, he wished he could. It would make things easier, for himself as well as his creations.

Some time passed and Rabbit and Spine managed to work Jon down from his state of despair. Rabbit tried to hide it, but when he pulled away from his youngest sibling, oil tears of his own streaked his copper face plates. The Spine was managing better at keeping face; but nobody could miss the notes of sadness underpinning the steely green optics.

Colonel Walter tried again, leerier this time. “Please, The Jon,” he said quietly, gently. “I need you to agree to these prerogatives.”

The Jon looked longways and held his hands loosely behind his back. Rabbit was standing close to him, as if on the verge of swallowing the brassold bot in another hug. But instead, he was busy implementing one of his clever ideas; discreetly, with more gentleness than a tall copper robot had a right to employ, Rabbit found one of Jon’s small hands with his own and fiddled with it until The Jon allowed for his eldest brother to cross his middle finger behind his index. Of course, The Jon didn’t know what this meant, at least, not at the moment; and when he looked at Rabbit to silently question it, Walter assumed that he only looked toward the senior robot for reassurance.

“It’s okay,” Rabbit said in earnest, playing into the idea that he was coaching The Jon along, just like any other day. “You can promise.” One of his optics quickly and discreetly winked. “Trust me.”

“Jon,” Walter tried one last time. “Human lives come before everything. Even before yourself…even before each other. Yes?”

The Jon chose to trust Rabbit, if not shakingly. He held his hand in its position behind his back. Fingers crossed. The Spine saw it and he and Rabbit exchanged a knowing glance. 

The Jon swallowed back the last of his tears. “Yes,” he whispered. “Yes, sir.”


End file.
